


Daylight on Nostramo

by Immanuel



Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: Gen, Night Lords, Nostramo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-15 01:48:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9213749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immanuel/pseuds/Immanuel
Summary: (or, the Sunless Dawn)Kazik the Impaler, exiled Librarian of the Night Lords, recalls the story his mother told him of the first and only dawn on the sunless world - the day the Emperor came to Nostramo.





	

_“Only the path of night leads to the dawn.”_

THERE WAS NO dawn on Nostramo. Half the planet had always been locked in true night, while the other had been spared the sun only by the regular solar eclipses caused by Tenebor. If humanity had ever inhabited the planet in such a time, none could imagine it in the endless nights when the weak glimmer of our dying star failed to pierce the polluted smog that poured from a million manufactora. To its people, it had always been the sunless world, the midnight city of Nostramo Quintus scarcely darker than the shrouded noon of Primus.  
  The coming of the Emperor brought a false dawn to the world of endless night. Some cried out in adoration. Others screamed in pain. But the same words came from every throat.  
  ‘ _The sun rises! The sun rises!_ ’  
  To those who had lived their lives in darkness, it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen. They couldn’t look away. The light, that beautiful, terrible light, reached into my mother’s eyes and burned His image onto her retinas. He was the last thing she ever saw.  
  My mother was only one of tens of thousands whose sight was stolen that day. All of them, doomed to see only the Emperor wherever they looked. Unable to turn away forevermore. Others dropped dead in the street. I always thought they were the lucky ones, spared the dark nights that followed. They must have seemed even darker to those who had seen the Emperor’s dawn.  
  The Night Haunter screamed loudest of all. It was the most terrifying sound anyone had ever heard – and these were a people raised in the days when their king broadcast the tortured shrieks of criminals across the planetary vox-net. The King of Terrors, wailing like a struck child at the mere sight of his Father.  
  I was born a few months later. I don’t remember my mother’s name, or even what she looked like. I just remember the way she looked at me – sightless eyes boring into me as if she could overcome her blindness by willpower alone. Sometimes I thought I could see Him in those ghastly, bleached orbs.  
  ‘ _You are touched by the light of the Emperor,_ ’ she told me.  
  She was not wrong.  
  I dreamed of light as a child. Of the day I would see my first dawn. They were prophetic before the poison in the Night Haunter’s blood turned them to darkness. Every child was raised with stories of the Night Haunter, but I remember my mother’s tales of the Emperor far more vividly. They were the stories that burned my mind and set my dreams on fire. They always ended the same way.  
  ‘ _They’re coming back,_ ’ she told me. Every night, with such conviction behind the eyes He took from her. The Night Haunter and justice were one and the same on Nostramo. Without him, the nights grew darker, and the people forgot the lessons he had taught in blood. Our king had turned his back on us. Yet my mother never wavered. ‘ _They’re coming back._ ’  
  She was wrong.  
  The Emperor never returned to Nostramo, and the Night Haunter – well, his return came a century later and marked the end of everything. The Legion, though, they came for me. One dark night I dreamed of it – bolts of lightning striking me, setting me ablaze, lifting me into the sky. My mother wept when I told her. I had only ever seen her cry before when she spoke of the first and only dawn.  
  ‘ _You are touched by the light of the Emperor,_ ’ she told me. ‘ _And the Emperor protects._ ’

“Imagine my disappointment when I met my new father.”  
  A long silence greeted the remark. The priest stood unmoving, his presence blending into the plascrete walls of the cell. He allowed the bitterness of the Night Lord’s words to fill the space until it was clear he would not continue unprompted.  
  “It was never easy to admire Curze.”  
  Kazik looked up at the priest, eyes narrowed against the flickering light of the brazier. Armoured from neck to toe in ceramite plate as black as Kazik’s eyes, the priest towered over him. There was nothing but sincerity in the priest’s eyes, irises seeming to ripple in the firelight like liquid gold. They were the kind of eyes Kazik had always thought the Emperor might have.  
  “Konrad Curze doesn’t exist,” he hissed, grip tightening around his fallen brother’s swordstaff. Unarmoured, his hands were stained the same bright red as the horsehair fetish hanging from the quillons of the _jian-gun_ blade. “He never did. He was the myth the Emperor created because the Night Haunter was too monstrous a reality. We were supposed to be angels. Instead we - _I_ became the worst of sinners.”  
  “You left that life behind. Left your Legion behind.”  
  Kazik’s eyes flicked to the priest’s shoulder, where a single plate stood apart from the black. Molecular bonding studs had been driven through whatever faded heraldry marked the granite-grey pauldron in a makeshift repair.  
  “Are you offering me absolution, priest?”  
  “Nothing so simple. Those marks on your hands,” the priest gestured. “The sinner’s mark. You told me it means your life is forfeit, but also that you owe service until that time is come. Your father is a traitor. That does not mean you cannot serve the Emperor. My Lord is giving you that chance.”  
  Kazik looked at his hands. They were his condemnation, but the weapon they held was his hope. Suijin had sworn his own death-oath, what he called _sagyar mazan_. Perhaps here, an exile among exiles, Kazik too could find redemption in death. He met the priest’s eyes, but saw only the Emperor standing before him.  
  “The Emperor protects.”


End file.
